sam henri goldThe MacBook Neo is such an interesting machine that it coaxed a thousand-word-essay out of me: https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/
Matt Campbell@samhenrigold Plus, in a better world, the resource limits of the MacBook Neo wouldn't be felt at all except in extreme cases. There was a time when 8 GB of RAM and whatever processing power an A18 has would have seemed unimaginably vast. Maybe software developers like me can move us a little closer to that better world.
@samhenrigold Some of my most formative experiences as a teenager learning to be a software developer happened on a laptop with a 486SX processor (the main limitation of the "SX" family, the lack of hardware floating-point support, was the core of one such experience), 4 MB of RAM, and a ~170 MB hard drive. Granted, that was in 1996-97. Those specs were probably considered inadequate even in that time.
Colin Parker@matt @samhenrigold Yes, by ‘97 Pentium Pro and PowerPC machines were common, with 16 MB RAM or more. Somehow those machines let you multitask, e.g. Winamp, AIM, a browser, and MS word, fitting together, while today, the size of a single tool can exceed the typical HD capacity of that era, let alone RAM (e.g. Slack has a 350 MB install size, Office is 4 GB, and it’s not uncommon to see browsers sucking down 1 GB+ of RAM). And yet what do they do that you couldn’t back then?